by Howard Bloom
Needless to say, the administration was not pleased by my display of small-mammal etiquette. As I concluded my botch of the social graces, three projectiles hurtled down three separate aisles toward me, all converging on the spot where I stood. One was the headmaster, another the assistant headmaster, and a third the football coach. Steam shot from each of their balding heads and sparks leaped from their eyeballs in a frantic attempt to escape the inferno within. I was less fortunate than the sparks. I couldn’t escape. The burly trio cornered me, and each gave me a piece of his mind, thus presumably leaving his brain with one smoldering chunk permanently missing.
I was easily embarrassed in those days. (I still am.) If I’d been Japanese, I’d have covered my face with my sleeve, gone off to the biology lab, found a clean scalpel, and removed my intestines. But being a nice Jewish boy raised by small rodents and guppies, I improvised. I found a large, dark closet and hid for the rest of the day. When my patient French teacher hunted all over campus to find me and introduce her prize student to her favorite dean, I was nowhere in sight.
It seems Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos (the three Fates, who hold the textile concession on Mt. Olympus) had decided to weave my threads together with those of the poor, innocent Middlebury dignitary once again. Six years later, he was the dean who delivered the speech that reduced Barbara to a weepy mess.
Under circumstances like these, what is a man educated on Aucassin et Nicolette supposed to do? Come to the rescue, of course, preferably mounted on a gorgeous steed. So my firing from the Boy Scouts turned out to be a gift. It gave me the freedom to catch the first Greyhound Bus (I couldn’t find a horse) back to Middlebury, and secure us an apartment off-campus (though the Puritanical landlady was extremely suspicious when I told her that Barbara and I were married, especially since I looked about sixteen). I calmed Barbara’s sobbing, wrung out her tear-drenched clothes, and spent the next month speaking French and getting to know the local citizenry as I marched from one end of town to another seeking odd jobs (the only sort appropriate to an odd person).
Meanwhile, another obstacle reared its ugly head and sneered in our direction. Barbara’s mother (who is anything but ugly; in fact, she’s quite delightful) announced that, to help take a load off Barbara’s mind, she’d drop everything and spend the year in Paris taking care of Barbara’s daughter, Nanette. Why, you may ask, was this a problem? After all, good baby-sitters are hard to find. Especially in France. Well, you see, Barbara’s mother comes from good Daughters of the American Revolution stock, and DAR women of her generation have a certain problem with sex. Within the confines of marriage, they seem perfectly capable of enjoying it. But they are utterly unable to talk about it, think about it, or imagine that their daughters might be having it under conditions defined in those days as “sin.” So the impending presence of Mama Steele meant that the whole purpose of my trip to France was in serious jeopardy. How could I possibly slip into Barbara’s bed—or into Barbara—on a regular basis if her mother sat up in a rocking chair all night watching Barbara’s bedroom door?
Then, one evening, a female friend to whom I was confessing my woes came up with a solution. For six months, Barbara had insisted that I make an honest woman of her. I had steadfastly refused. Not that I had anything against honesty, mind you. I didn’t think I could stand even the tiniest fib. Though some of the white lies chronicled in this book might indicate just how little I knew myself. Nonetheless, cleaning up Barbara’s morals seemed to involve marriage. And marriage, I’d learned from my grandmother, my mother, and my aunts in New Jersey, was a state of warfare between the sexes which I regarded with the same enthusiasm I reserved for pleasures like being sautéed in hot sauce.
Nonetheless, there was an irresistible appeal to my female counselor’s logic. How do you sleep with a girl when her mother is in the same apartment? How do you do it over and over again, pretty much whenever you want (or whenever she doesn’t tell you to keep your distance because your breath smells like dead pollywogs), without the mother having you arrested by the vice squad. Or without the girl’s father, in Barbara’s case a father the size of a steam shovel, using you as raw material in his latest recipe for squirrel ragout? You get married.
So pushing aside my memories of my parents, aunts, and uncles dusting each other daily with mustard gas, I dashed to the phone, called Barbara at Middlebury, and told her we were getting hitched. I didn’t bother to ask her consent. There was no time. We had only three weeks left before we were due to head for Orly Airport, and Barbara was still legally married to a 6’3” poet.
So I jumped off the line, leaving Barbara to terrified visions of being tied for the rest of her life to someone who looked like a mutated Muppet. I hastily counted the money I’d made by writing works of enduring literature for the Scouting movement, made an appointment with the cheapest divorce lawyer I could find, discovered that we’d have to get Barbara on a plane for Mexico the minute she finished her sentence at Middlebury in order to give the law ten days to validate the quickie amputation of her previous spouse and still allow ourselves twenty-four hours in which to get married and pack for France, and that the whole thing would cost me approximately twice as much money as I had. So I called Barbara’s mom.
Barbara’s parents, as you remember, had been horrified by her first husband. Anything that could walk, talk, breathe, and was approximately male would, in their opinion, be a vast improvement. I fit all the above criteria, more or less. So they ignored my peculiar tendencies, and gave me the rest of the money to pay for the divorce. Then they even volunteered to plan and pay for the wedding. Nice people.
They didn’t bother to ask Barbara if she still wanted to go through with it. She didn’t. But the wheels of fortune had begun to grind, and those wheels had something in common with the fifty-dollar car Barbara had shared with her boyfriend—they had no brakes.
u
I’ll skip the part about how, on the plane back from the divorce mill in Juarez, the jazz musician Art Blakey sat next to Barbara and convinced her to ditch me and come live with him and how—following the recommendations of a book on North Korean brainwashing techniques (yes, for real)—I stood Barbara under a naked light bulb (this is the truth) for twelve hours, badgering her into forgetting Blakey and going through with the ceremony that would chain her to me. She finally gave up when dawn arrived and it became obvious that I wasn’t going to let her sleep unless she said yes.
Then, a week before the marriage (a nice, atheistic affair) was due to occur, another thought hit me. I was about to become the father of a five-year-old. In fourteen days, my newly-acquired child would enter first grade in the Parisian school I had found for her. And first grade is a vital time. It’s when you learn to read and write. But Nanette, despite her Francophonic name, wouldn’t know how to speak the language. Not a word of it. Not a single s’il vous plait. And with that obstacle in her path, she would never learn to read. Her only contact with literature would be the pictures in The Adventures of Tintin comic books. She’d never get a job, and would end up on welfare, drinking Sterno, unable even to sell drugs because she’d never mastered arithmetic. My sense of duty as an about-to-be-minted parent blared out one simple message: we had to cancel our trip to France. So Barbara and I never made it to the Sorbonne after all.
Meanwhile, Barbara’s mother had organized a splashy yet unpretentious celebration at Kingston’s famed Governor Clinton Hotel, complete with live musicians. She’d attempted to hire several dead ones, but they’d been unable to attend.
And my parents took care of our honeymoon. More specifically, they drove us back the 110 miles from Kingston to New York City after the ceremony and the party. On the way, my mom and dad demonstrated proper marital procedure by shrieking maniacal insults at each other for the entire three and a half hours. By the time Barbara and I arrived back in our own territory, prepared to enter married bliss, we were in a cold sweat.
To top it a
ll off, Nanette, now my charming daughter, staged a riot when I denied her the right to destroy our new $80 bargain-store stereo system, a wedding gift from my brother and my best friend in high school, both of whom were impoverished students. Suddenly, our landlady, the spitting image of a Salem witch, banged on the door to see what all the commotion was about. To secure the apartment a week earlier, I’d told this highly moral woman that Barbara and I were already married. Nanette, my resourceful stepchild, hauled the bride and groom that had adorned the top of the wedding cake out of the garbage and revealed with an evil leer that we’d just been hitched that morning. In those days, that was shocking.
Realizing that she was now doomed to several thousand years in purgatory for harboring a couple gift-wrapped in evil, the building’s proprietress turned a disturbing shade of blue and collapsed. Nanette crossed her arms and beamed in triumph.
MOTHER OF FIVE RUNS OFF TO EUROPE
WITH TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD JAZZ
MUSICIAN, LEAVES CHILDREN WITH…ME?
Most books conclude with the couple clasping each other in their arms, declaring their undying devotion, and disappearing into a blank swatch of paper at the end of page 248, presumably to live blissfully forever after. This is an act of literary fraud. In the vast majority of boy-meets-girl, boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl-again tales, the part after the ending is where the love story really fumbles or goes over the goal line. Alas, authors, pounding away at the typewriter with a bottle of Old Mushrat Rye on their right, a couple of cigarettes in each side of their mouth, and a pile of alimony checks waiting to be paid, can only shudder when they think of what occurs after the words “I do.” These poor souls, alas, are missing out on the best part. Because it’s after the courtship that the love affair begins.
But first, a digression. It was now 1965. The seeds and stems of the new decade that I had helped sow three years earlier were spreading like crabgrass. California was luring young women into a wonderland of fringed leather jackets, flower power, light shows, and sex with any passing object that bore an upright protuberance of the correct dimensions. Sugar cubes were sliding down gullets from coast to coast. People everywhere from Kansas to Carnaby Street were attempting to start their own Haight-Ashburys. And the mutant remains of my own legacy were about to pounce on me in Brooklyn.
Brooklyn? How in the world did my new family and I land in a borough of New York whose name was so peculiar that it was used as the punchline a dozen times per episode in the Colgate Comedy Hour, one of the biggest laugh shows of the early 1950s?
After I married Barbara, I realized that my new spouse had thrown the total responsibility for her daughter into my hands. Being Jewish and all, I probably would have grabbed the responsibility and run with it even if it hadn’t been fired at me like a shell from Saddam Hussein’s only-half-mythical giant cannon.
You’ll recall that Barbara and I had started living together in one of New York’s more colorful slums—the Lower East Side. As a previous chapter vividly recounts, I had suspended our Parisian migration when I realized that if my newly-acquired child entered first grade in a country gauche enough to speak French, she was highly unlikely to learn the three R’s, and would probably become a washerwoman. This didn’t seem a suitable fate for the offspring of a Semitic father, even if she wasn’t my offspring in the strict biological sense, and even if her profoundest wish was that I’d disappear by spontaneous combustion at the nearest possible instant, thus leaving her to tyrannize her mother in peace.
Don’t ask me why, but I had the feeling that the school down the block from our inner-city apartment in the land of high-speed lead projectiles would do Nanette even less good than a year of pedagogical headbanging in the Republic of Parlez-vous. So I marched off to the Dean of NYU’s graduate education department and asked her if there were any good schools in neighborhoods that Barbara and I could afford. After all, I was a mere freshman in college, and without an income, private school is somewhat difficult to pay for. The lady dean was kind enough to provide the necessary information, and I hunted for apartments in the neighborhoods that might allow us to sneak Nanette into an institution for the potentially sane. There were only two of them: Riverdale and Brooklyn.
I subwayed out to Riverdale. Much too snooty.
This is how we were Brooklynized. We moved to Cobble Hill, a territory that had only been gentrifying for about five years, which means that you could still rent an entire floor in a run-down slum brownstone for $125 a month, but that most of the other parents in the neighborhood were on their way into the Mercedes set and had pressured their school into acting like an actual hall of learning.
But there is more to raising a child properly than merely getting her into a decent grammar school. Not to mention getting her into her clothes in the morning. As an avid student of psychology, I had read one of legendary psychologist Harry Harlow’s more obscure studies on infant rhesus monkeys. In the researches that gained him his fame, old Harry had proved that infants need mother love more than they need mere food and chicken wire. But in the lesser-known experiment I’m referring to, Harlow had demonstrated something far more intriguing—that even if they are deprived of their mothers, baby monkeys turn out socially hale and hearty provided they have an opportunity to bond, cavort, and make mischief with a group of other youngsters their own age. So, wanting Nanette to grow up like a healthy rhesus monkey, I diligently hunted down every kid her age in our new neighborhood, set up dates for my struggling stepchild with each of them, then forced her to go off—much against her will—and play with utter strangers.
The scheme worked. Within six months, Nanette had bonded to the group and become the leader of the pack, much to the chagrin of the pack’s parents, since Nanette was still a five-year-old from hell.
Acting as Nanette’s social secretary, I rapidly became acquainted with most of the parents in the neighborhood, all of whom were far older and wealthier than I. Of particular note among this mixed klatch of single mothers, flagrant bohemians, writers for The New York Times, and what would be known in the 1980s as Yuppies, were the folks up at the corner. First of all, they had a girl Nanette’s age who made my daughter look like a saint. I mean, anyone who spent more than ten seconds within arm’s length of this little terror rapidly ended up crippled for life. Naturally, the monster in question became one of Nanette’s best friends. And the demon’s parents rapidly took a shine to us.
This parental twosome who occupied the entire brownstone on the corner was something utterly alien to my sensibilities—the epitome of upscale Connecticut suburbia. In fact, a Connecticut suburb was precisely where they had lived until they’d moved to Brooklyn, seeking street-crime and adventure. The husband was the comptroller for the Itek Corporation. Though I had no idea of what the company did, it sounded impressive. The wife was a clothing designer who pulled in a hefty $450 a week (approximately $172,799.61 a year in today’s dollars).
In his spare time, hubby was active on the show-dog circuit, where he judged pedigreed bulldogs, or something of the sort. He was perfectly suited for the job. Because of a certain squared-off and determined Anglo-Saxon facial structure, he simply compared the dog’s physiognomy to his own, and the canine that resembled him the most walked away with a blue ribbon, painfully afraid that wearing such a frill might make him look like a sissy. Just to top off the station-wagon image, the couple had five, yes, I kid you not, five kids!
At first I couldn’t figure out why these people continually invited us to dinner. Anyone with his eyeglasses on could have told you that we came from radically different cultures. Barbara, Nanette and I lived at our crumbling end of the block eating a diet of lentils and chicken hearts, then lounged about on furniture that we had hauled in off the street (actually, there was very little lounging in the Bloom household, since I worked like a maniac from 9:00 a.m. until 10:00 p.m. trying to maintain my 4.0 grade point average, and Barbara was taking a double dose of grad
uate courses in education so she could become a teacher and support us). The Wentworths (the family of haute bourgeoisie with the quintet of kids from a horror comic) dined on whatever was most elegant at the moment, spent more on a single meal that we invested in groceries in a month, then burped off the results on the kind of couches you see in pictures in Architectural Digest, pieces of furniture each of which cost the equivalent of sixty years income for an average family from Kenya.
But gradually, the truth began to emerge. Mr. Wentworth was not entirely on the straight and narrow. His weekends at dog shows all over the East Coast provided him with the opportunity to do more than merely sniff the schnauzers. A good many very wealthy and attractive women showed up as either the owners of prize-winning pooches or as fellow gavel-bangers passing judgement on the innocent hounds. Monsieur Wentworth was apparently slipping between the sheets with as many of these canine loverettes as he could get his hands on.
What’s worse, the man had a few bolts loose in his cast-iron cranium (you know how Anglo-Saxon workmanship has been going downhill ever since the unions got a hammer lock on the aristocracy in jolly old England). Mr. Wentworth (Cyril to his friends) liked to drink, a well-respected Anglo custom (on my first trip to Britain, I was astonished to discover that the entire population of the office in which I was working took a multi-hour alcohol break promptly at two o’clock every day and repaired to the pub downstairs; I later found out that it is illegal to sport a British accent unless you can certify that your blood cells have ceased the nasty habit of swimming in normal hematological fluids and are afloat in an undiluted stream of brewed or distilled beverages). In addition, Wentworth Sr. had a temper not unlike those found in the psychiatric wards at Bellevue.